Excerpts from the Interview with
Chief Writer Yasuyuki Muto
"In the beginning was the word": Creator Interview
The story in this series is woven with great attention paid to the "feelings" and "words" of the characters. Yasuyuki Muto, who, as chief writer, has supervised the largest number of scripts for the series, gives us behind the scenes stories about the production, and talks with us about the appeal of the series' setting, as well as the "side story" script which is printed in this booklet.
At first he was going to turn down Chevalier?!
When I was first offered work on this show, I thought about refusing it. The content certainly caught my interest, but since it's a period work based on historical fact, and I have such lazy study habits, I thought it would be hard for me to handle. But when one of the producers, Nakatake, told me that I had been recommended personally by the director Kazuhiro Furuhashi, I knew that I couldn't let an opportunity like this slip by, and I accepted the job. In these past several years since I took the plunge into the animation studio, I've met with many disappointments, and there have been times when I've considered quitting. But seeing one of Kazuhiro Furuhashi's works would remind me why I decided to enter this field in the first place. One of the big reasons why I decided to switch to scriptwriting was, "I don't know how many years it's going to take, but some day I want to have a story that I've written be directed by Kazuhiro Furuhashi." Since that dream came true faster than I had expected, I decided to put everything I had into this work.
A script woven with particular attention to "humanness" and "words."
As soon as the script reading session began, I understood that my job was going to be to think in concrete terms about how I should move the characters within the story's large framework and flow.
Mr. Ubukata's draft for the series structure was very rough at first, but because of that, I was able to have a lot of freedom in writing each individual episode. I was allowed to do pretty much whatever I wanted, including creating the characters' personalities and other such things. Mr. Ubukata even seemed to enjoy it. He supported me by being in agreement with the images of the characters that I wanted to present, by helping with constructing the right scenery and social structure for the period, and by helping with the set-up of the world within the series. For example, Teillagory was an actual historical figure, but very little material about him exists. So I turned the tables on the situation by coming up with the idea of saying that he had lost his son. When I suggested using that as a part of the drama, Mr. Ubukata reconciled it with "certain historical facts," which reinforced the necessity and persuasiveness of the idea. We kept tossing various things like that back and forth, and as we did the characters took on depth. That process was the epitome of a collaborative production.
I pay very careful attention to the words said in the show. It begins with words from what is probably the most read book in the world, and that is one of the themes. Even in the titles I was involved in before Chevalier, I did everything I could to reject the use of things like easy, token expressions and explanation for the sake of explanation, but there were a lot of times when what I wrote was changed, for example when they were drawing up the storyboards. But this time, with the director Furuhashi wanting to place emphasis on each line, there were no cases where any of the token lines or unnecessary "parroting" that I made it a point to keep out of the script showed up in the storyboard phase.
Read the rest of the interview when you pick up your copy of Volume 1!
